One little lump changed the course of the rest of my life. A little lump that I had found during my daily shower routine. A little lump that didn’t hurt, but I could feel it and knew that it was there. I found this lump in my Labia Majora in December of 2016. The following January I scheduled an appointment for my annual checkup with a new OB/GYN in the area that we had just moved to. During my exam I brought up my concerns with the lump and the doctor hardly looked at it, dismissing it as a swollen lymph node. She explained that as long as it didn’t hurt or get any bigger it was nothing to worry about and that it would go away in a few months.

    The months came and went and the lump stayed there. In August I started seeing a new OB/GYN as the previous one was of no help to me. We were trying to conceive and having no luck, I brought up my previous exam with the new doctor and spoke with him about this little lump. He asked if I had noticed any changes in the lump or if it hurt; I told him “No, its just still there.” He said that since I hadn’t noticed any changes he didn’t see the need to take a look at it at that time but when I came in for an exam he would take a look at it then.

    January 26th, 2018 I went in for my annual checkup, had my Pap-smear & blood work done. During this exam I reminded my doctor of the lump so he gladly took a look at it. In the time from when I had seen him last I had noticed a slight difference in the lump, it seemed bigger to me, my Labia Majora was being weighed down in a sense. Upon his examination he decided that it was a Bartholin’s Cyst. He told me usually they don’t do anything for them unless its bothering you, I had already dealt with it for a year so I just wanted to know for sure what it was. He gave me two options; he could make an incision in office that day and drain it with a 10% chance that it would come back, or we could schedule an appointment for me to come back and he would completely sedate me and cut it out & it would be gone for good. We decided to take our chances and have him drain it in office. He started the procedure and when making his incision realized that it was in fact NOT a cyst. This little lump was tissue, he then believed it to be a Lipoma & explained that they are not commonly found in that area, usually in more muscular areas like the shoulders or back & asked if I had found any lumps anywhere else. I said no and he continued to remove as much tissue as he could. He explained to me that Lipoma’s are normally not cancerous but he was going to send it off to pathology just to be safe.

    The following Tuesday I got a notification that my test results were in and that everything looked great from my Pap-smear & my blood work, the pathology results were not in yet and it could take up to a week to get them back. Later that evening I received a message from the nurse that the pathology results were in and that she also noticed that I hadn’t scheduled a followup with my doctor. She instructed me to call and schedule a followup and that the doctor would go over the results of the pathology then. I called to schedule the appointment and was told I wouldn’t be able to see my doctor for almost a month, or I could see one of his associates in two weeks. I went ahead and scheduled the appointment with the associate but messaged the nurse back with the appointment information and asked if some one could please call me and let me know what was going on, two weeks was a long time to wait. She messaged me right back, apologized for the scheduling mishap & told me she had rescheduled my appointment for later that day. 

    Nervous about the results I had my best friend meet me at the doctors office, my boyfriend was stuck at work it was the last day of the month. They called me to the back and sat me in a room & had me get ready for my doctor to check where he had made his incision a few days prior. He came in, checked me over and said that I was healing well and that it looked good. He then sat down to go over my results. “It’s Cancer” he says. Words you never in your lifetime think that you will hear, especially when you were previously told that it was nothing. Tears instantly swelled up in my eyes and rolled down my face as I looked over to my best friend.